DevOps, ALM and Software Development

Load and performance analyzing is often only done the moment it is needed. The moment customers are walking away from the slushy and bad responsive system. Too late tools are put in place to start profiling the system for finding the bottle neck and that one slow statement. Better to start performance monitoring and load testing from the beginning. With the cloud tools available it is even fun. Structuring the Load and Performance monitoring and analyzing practices of your team is the only answer. The good thing, it is easy now the Cloud is here. That easy a team member silently confessed he liked it (I promised not to mention his name in public). A lit bit up front thinking is needed. T... [More]

A few weeks ago we joined a global DevOps hackathon from the Netherlands. Our team, creative named ‘DutchOps’, decided to make a DevOps Assessment tool. The hackathon was mainly about sharing, building and transferring DevOps knowledge. The System. The realized system is cloud only. A DocumentDB (see diagram at the bottom) stores all questionnaires. This makes the system flexible to change question types. An Angular Web App loads the questionnaire based on an questionnaire type and renders the questions. The respondent answers the questions and submits the filled assessment to an Azure Queue. This decouples the system and makes it easier to switch analysis. An Azure function triggered... [More]

You would think this message means… “Website with given name already exists”. All but that, it means you have Visual Studio debugging enabled for version 2015. The warning before is actually the real error, “request value VS2015 not found”. A known error when executing the PowerShell script: “Get-AzureWebSite”… read : https://github.com/Azure/azure-powershell/issues/462 Simply switching off Remote Debugging doesn’t solve it. You must set it to 2013. The fun thing, when you remote debug again from VS2015, the action ‘Attach Debugger –> Applying remote debugger settings’… will switch the settings back for your Azure Website, resulting again in failing deployments. Go... [More]

Start, stop, schedule, snooze, categorize and get mail notifications on start stop actions and usages, capabilities available in the free Sogeti OneShare Office 365 add-in. Go to you Office 365 Store and look for OneShare, or got to the setting in a site and search for the add-in with id WA104380108. There you will find the Sogeti OneShare Add-in. We created the add-in for Azure Enterprise agreements to make teams flexible without loosing control on the costs and optimizes the usages of Azure resources. The OneShare Enterprise Add-in has some more capabilities, like maintain resource groups with a schedule and the capability to use ARM templates to create environments. Also the... [More]

The evolution of DevTest Labs with DTAP environments, cloud, containers, toggles and serverless platforms. New platform capabilities and architectural patterns will change the need of a DevTest Lab. Environments Dev/Test Labs are used in software development for decades. Different types of environments are helping teams with continues integration, deployment and testing while delivering business value. Maintaining proper environments for these activities is known as a must-have practice for DevOps teams in Application Lifecycle Management. Multiple environments (or stages) are used by teams, the development environment (or better an integration environment), the Test environment , Accepta... [More]

‘If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.’ Jack Welch Henrik Kniberg played a major role at Spotify to set up the organization. He worked for them for many years as an Agile/Lean coach, and now fulfills the same role with Lego. Kniberg produced two videos with infographics in which he gives a very detailed explanation of the method of working . The ten highlights below provide a good understanding (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number). Business alignment versus autonomy Focus on staff motivation Experiment-friendly culture Making mistakes faster as a mission Minimum Lovable Product Minimum Viable Bureaucracy ... [More]

With the new Azure DevTest Lab capabilities you can create an artifact repository for your DevTest VM’s. One of the scenarios for this Artifact repository is the Browser Lab. Create artifacts for all browsers you want to validate your system against. Something I already did for you. You can find it in this GitHub repository . Simply connect it to your own Azure DevTest Lab and it will give you a list of browsers you can add to a Lab VM. It uses chocolatey for deploying the different browsers, feel free to add more. To add it to your own Azure DevTest Lab add the GitHub URL as a new artifact repository and use the master branch. You also need to add a Personal Access Token... [More]

Always good to update the team about ongoing releases. By using the Slack API in a VSTS PowerShell Release Task it is easy to update your team members. To post messsage to Slack from VSTS I used the VSTS Powershell task with a function to post messages. For the PowerShell function I re-used the implementation from http://wahlnetwork.com/2015/08/17/using-powershell-to-post-slack-messages/ (thx), tuned it a bit with Release specific parameters and all that is left is adding a VSTS PowerShell Release Task which calls the PowerShell method. Too easy… It should be even easier when there is a custom taks for VSTS to post messages, or a Zapier action, or a Service Hook in Slack https://www.vis... [More]

The scenario. A team working on a Provider Hosted SharePoint Add-in, hosted on Azure with multiple deployments for different O365 tenants. The development team wants a friction free, controlled and with as less as possible manual tasks delivery of the system to the different customers. The setup. The team uses GIT with Visual Studio Team Services to organize their sources, backlog, tasks, builds and releases. A default GitFlow policy is used for the branching structure with a drop to GitHub for the created Open Source components. Azure Resource Manager JSON definitions are used for creating the Azure Resources used by the system. The Development team Every team member uses its own develop... [More]